More NYPD Officers Hitting the Street in 'One City' Effort

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton on Thursday introduced their new community policing initiative, called "One City, Safe and Fair".

As part of the initiative, there will be more community police officers around. They will be called "neighborhood police officers" because they will be broken down into the various neighborhoods and each precinct.

The mayor and police commissioner said a number of the officers will be called NCOs, or Neighborhood Coordinating Officers. There will be a number of them in each precinct. They will be responsible for meeting with various community leaders, churches and business owners.

De Blasio and Bratton said this is not new, that it is going back to the old foot patrols when the officers knew everyone in their community.

Patrol officers will also spend one-third of their day addressing quality-of-life issues, getting to know their community as well.

The police commissioner also said they are switching from doing two police academy classes per year, which is what they've been doing for years. They are going to four classes per year, at least for the next year, to get more officers on the job.

Starting next month in July, there will be 1,200 new officers hired, and they will go through training. The next class will be a few months after that.

"The next class coming in, we anticipate will be October, 400," Bratton said. "Next class, three months later, 400. And we'll hire at that pace so that by the end of next fiscal year, June 30, we will have hired up the 1,297 officers that the Council and the mayor are authorizing, plus the normal attrition of about [1,400] or 1,500 that we normally experience each year."

The police commissioner's top brass said they are all also trying to shorten the process that people have to go through to get on the job. They said it often takes people about four years, and they said a lot of people just walk away from the process. They want to change that.

"Who the hell wants to wait around four years to get a job in today's society?" Bratton said. "And we're losing 50 percent of the candidates who drop out because they find other jobs. So this has been a major issue."

The NYPD says their whole program about this new policing and initiative will be on the city's website, nyc.gov.

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